Population

Brussels is located in one of the most urbanised regions of Europe, between Paris, London, the Rhine-Ruhr (Germany), and the Randstad (Netherlands). The Brussels-Capital Region has a population of around 1.2 million and has witnessed, in recent years, a remarkable increase in its population. In general, the population of Brussels is younger than the national average, and the gap between rich and poor is wider.^[140]

Brussels is the core of a built-up area that extends well beyond the region's limits. Sometimes referred to as the urban area of Brussels (French: aire urbaine de Bruxelles, Dutch: stedelijk gebied van Brussel) or Greater Brussels (French: Grand-Bruxelles, Dutch: Groot-Brussel), this area extends over a large part of the two Brabant provinces, including much of the surrounding arrondissement of Halle-Vilvoorde and some small parts of the arrondissement of Leuven in Flemish Brabant, as well as the northern part of Walloon Brabant.

The metropolitan area of Brussels is divided into three levels. Firstly, the central agglomeration (within the regional borders), with a population of 1,218,255 inhabitants.^[32] Adding the closest suburbs (French: banlieues, Dutch: buitenwijken) gives a total population of 1,831,496. Including the outer commuter zone (Brussels Regional Express Network (RER/GEN) area), the population is 2,676,701.^[34]^[35] Brussels is also part of a wider diamond-shaped conurbation, with Ghent, Antwerp and Leuven, which has about 4.4 million inhabitants (a little more than 40% of the Belgium's total population).^[36]^[141]

More information [verification needed], 01-07-2004 ...

^{[verification needed]}	01-07-2004^[142]	01-07-2005^[142]	01-07-2006^[142]	01-01-2008^[142]	01-01-2015^[142]	01-01-2019^[142]	01-01-2020^[142]
Brussels-Capital Region^[142]^{[verification needed]}	1.004.239	1.012.258	1.024.492	1.048.491	1.181.272	1.208.542	1.218.255
-- of which legal immigrants^[142]^{[verification needed]}	262.943	268.009	277.682	295.043	385.381	450.000	?

Close

Nationalities

More information Other countries/territories ...

Largest groups of foreign residents (2022)^[143]

France

68,418

Romania

45,243

Italy

35,154

Morocco

33,955

Spain

30,609

Poland

20,060

Portugal

18,968

Bulgaria

13,104

Germany

10,927

Greece

9,675

Other countries/territories
Syria	9,555
Turkey	8,494
Netherlands	8,287
Democratic Republic of the Congo	7,836
India	7,273
United Kingdom	5,322
Guinea	5,231
Brazil	4,834
Cameroon	4,473
Algeria	2,996

Close

There have been numerous migrations towards Brussels since the end of the 18th century, when the city acted as a common destination for political refugees from neighbouring or more distant countries, particularly France.^[144] From 1871, many of the Paris Communards fled to Brussels, where they received political asylum. Other notable international exiles living in Brussels at the time included Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Boulanger, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Léon Daudet, to name a few.^[144]^[145] Attracted by the industrial opportunities, many workers moved in, first from the other Belgian provinces (mainly rural residents from Flanders)^[146] and France, then from Southern European, and more recently from Eastern European and African countries.

Nowadays, Brussels is home to a large number of immigrants and émigré communities, as well as labour migrants, former foreign students or expatriates, and many Belgian families in Brussels can claim at least one foreign grandparent. At the last Belgian census in 1991, 63.7% of inhabitants in Brussels-Capital Region answered that they were Belgian citizens, born as such in Belgium, indicating that more than a third of residents had not been born in the country.^[147]^[148] According to Statbel (the Belgian Statistical Office), in 2020, taking into account the nationality of birth of the parents, 74.3% of the population of the Brussels-Capital Region was of foreign origin and 41.8% was of non-European origin (including 28.7% of African origin). Among those aged under 18, 88% were of foreign origin and 57% of non-European origin (including 42.4% of African origin).^[7]

This large concentration of immigrants and their descendants includes many of Moroccan (mainly Riffian and other Berbers) and Turkish ancestry, together with French-speaking black Africans from former Belgian colonies, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Many immigrants were naturalised following the great 1991 reform of the naturalisation process. In 2012, about 32% of city residents were of non-Belgian European origin (mainly expatriates from France, Romania, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Portugal) and 36% were of another background, mostly from Morocco, Turkey and Sub-Saharan Africa. Among all major migrant groups from outside the EU, a majority of the permanent residents have acquired Belgian nationality.^[149]

Languages

Brussels was historically Dutch-speaking, using the Brabantian dialect,^[151]^[152]^[153] but since the 19th century^[151]^[154] French has become the predominant language of the city.^[155] The main cause of this transition was the rapid assimilation of the local Flemish population,^[156]^[151]^[157]^[158]^[153] amplified by immigration from France and Wallonia.^[151]^[159] The rise of French in public life gradually began by the end of the 18th century,^[160]^[161] quickly accelerating after Belgian independence.^[162]^[163] Dutch — of which standardisation in Belgium was still very weak^[164]^[165]^[163] — could not compete with French, which was the exclusive language of the judiciary, the administration, the army, education, cultural life and the media, and thus necessary for social mobility.^[166]^[167]^[152]^[168]^[154] The value and prestige of the French language was universally acknowledged^[152]^[169]^[156]^[163]^[170]^[171] to such an extent that after 1880,^[172]^[173]^[164] and more particularly after the turn of the 20th century,^[163] proficiency in French among Dutch-speakers in Brussels increased spectacularly.^[174]

Although a majority of the population remained bilingual until the second half of the 20th century,^[174]^[156] family transmission of the historic Brabantian dialect^[175] declined,^[176] leading to an increase of monolingual French-speakers from 1910 onwards.^[169]^[177] From the mid-20th century, the number of monolingual French-speakers surpassed the number of mostly bilingual Flemish inhabitants.^[178] This process of assimilation weakened after the 1960s,^[174]^[179] as the language border was fixed, the status of Dutch as an official language of Belgium was reinforced,^[180] and the economic centre of gravity shifted northward to Flanders.^[164]^[172] However, with the continuing arrival of immigrants and the post-war emergence of Brussels as a centre of international politics, the relative position of Dutch continued to decline.^[181]^[154]^[182]^[183]^[174]^[176] Furthermore, as Brussels' urban area expanded,^[184] a further number of Dutch-speaking municipalities in the Brussels periphery also became predominantly French-speaking.^[180]^[185] This phenomenon of expanding Francisation — dubbed "oil slick" by its opponents^[156]^[186]^[174] — is, together with the future of Brussels,^[187] one of the most controversial topics in Belgian politics.^[172]^[167]

Nowadays, the Brussels-Capital Region is legally bilingual, with both French and Dutch having official status,^[188] as is the administration of the 19 municipalities.^[181] The creation of this bilingual, full-fledged region, with its own competencies and jurisdiction, had long been hampered by different visions of Belgian federalism. Nevertheless, some communitarian issues remain.^[189]^[190] Flemish political parties demanded, for decades, that the Flemish part of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) arrondissement be separated from the Brussels Region (which made Halle-Vilvoorde a monolingual Flemish electoral and judicial district). BHV was divided mid-2012. The French-speaking population regards the language border as artificial^[191] and demands the extension of the bilingual region to at least all six municipalities with language facilities in the surroundings of Brussels.^{[lower-alpha 4]} Flemish politicians have strongly rejected these proposals.^[192]^[193]^[194]

Owing to migration and to its international role, Brussels is home to a large number of native speakers of languages other than French or Dutch. Currently, about half of the population speaks a home language other than these two.^[195] In 2013, academic research showed that approximately 17% of families spoke none of the official languages in the home, while in a further 23% a foreign language was used alongside French. The share of unilingual French-speaking families had fallen to 38% and that of Dutch-speaking families to 5%, while the percentage of bilingual Dutch-French families reached 17%. At the same time, French remains widely spoken: in 2013, French was spoken "well to perfectly" by 88% of the population, while for Dutch this percentage was only 23% (down from 33% in 2000);^[181] the other most commonly known languages were English (30%), Arabic (18%), Spanish (9%), German (7%) and Italian and Turkish (5% each).^[150] Despite the rise of English as a second language in Brussels, including as an unofficial compromise language between French and Dutch, as well as the working language for some of its international businesses and institutions, French remains the lingua franca and all public services are conducted exclusively in French or Dutch.^[181]

The original dialect of Brussels (known as Brusselian, and also sometimes referred to as Marols or Marollien),^[51] a form of Brabantic (the variant of Dutch spoken in the ancient Duchy of Brabant) with a significant number of loanwords from French, still survives among a small minority of inhabitants called Brusseleers^[52] (or Brusseleirs), many of them quite bi- and multilingual, or educated in French and not writing in Dutch.^[196]^[51] The ethnic and national self-identification of Brussels' inhabitants is nonetheless sometimes quite distinct from the French and Dutch-speaking communities. For the French-speakers, it can vary from Francophone Belgian, Bruxellois^[54] (French demonym for an inhabitant of Brussels), Walloon (for people who migrated from the Walloon Region at an adult age); for Flemings living in Brussels, it is mainly either Dutch-speaking Belgian, Flemish or Brusselaar (Dutch demonym for an inhabitant), and often both. For the Brusseleers, many simply consider themselves as belonging to Brussels.^[51]

Religions

Religions in the Brussels-Capital Region (2016)^[197]

Catholicism (40%)

Islam (23%)

Protestantism (3%)

Other religions (4%)

Non-religious (30%)

Historically, Brussels has been predominantly Catholic, especially since the expulsion of Protestants in the 16th century. This is clear from the large number of historical churches in the region, particularly in the City of Brussels. The pre-eminent Catholic cathedral in Brussels is the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, serving as the co-cathedral of the Archdiocese of Mechelen–Brussels. On the north-western side of the region, the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart is a Minor Basilica and parish church, as well as one of the largest churches by area in the world.^[198] The Church of Our Lady of Laeken holds the tombs of many members of the Belgian royal family, including all the former Belgian monarchs, within the Royal Crypt.^[199]^[200]

In reflection of its multicultural makeup, Brussels hosts a variety of religious communities, as well as large numbers of atheists and agnostics. Minority faiths include Islam, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Buddhism. According to a 2016 survey, approximately 40% of residents of Brussels declared themselves Catholics (12% were practising Catholics and 28% were non-practising Catholics), 30% were non-religious, 23% were Muslim (19% practising, 4% non-practising), 3% were Protestants and 4% were of another religion.^[197]

As guaranteed by Belgian law, recognised religions and non-religious philosophical organisations (French: organisations laïques, Dutch: vrijzinnige levensbeschouwelijke organisaties)^[201] enjoy public funding and school courses. It was once the case that every pupil in an official school from 6 to 18 years old had to choose two hours per week of compulsory religious—or non-religious-inspired morals—courses. However, in 2015, the Belgian Constitutional Court ruled religious studies could no longer be required in the primary and secondary educational systems.^[202]

Brussels has a large concentration of Muslims, mostly of Moroccan, Turkish, Syrian and Guinean ancestry. The Great Mosque of Brussels, located in the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark, is the oldest mosque in Brussels and the former seat of the Islamic and Cultural Centre of Belgium.^[203] Belgium does not collect statistics by ethnic background or religious beliefs, so exact figures are unknown.^[204] It was estimated that, in 2005, people of Muslim background living in the Brussels Region numbered 256,220 and accounted for 25.5% of the city's population, a much higher concentration than those of the other regions of Belgium.^[205]^{[better source needed]}

More information Regions of Belgium (1 January 2016), Total population ...

Regions of Belgium^[205] (1 January 2016)	Total population	People of Muslim origin	% of Muslims
Belgium	11,371,928	603,642	5.3%
Brussels-Capital Region	1,180,531	212,495	18%
Wallonia	3,395,942	149,421	4.4%
Flanders	6,043,161	241,726	4.0%

Close